Janet Napolitano’s Hobson’s Choice and the Russell-Huxley Dilemma

We hear that 39 people have been murdered by a suicide bomber in a Shiite Mosque in southern Iran, on one of the holiest days for Shia Muslims. Evidently there is terrorism in the world.

Janet Napolitano and the Leviathan State Democrats, who were preceded by Leviathan State Republicans, have given the public a Hobson’s choice: either consent to having your nude photo taken and ogled, plus a dose of radiation thrown in for free, or else submit to a groping of one’s genitals and breasts. This is the choice given the public by Barack Obama and his administration, and Janet Napolitano. It is the violation of the Jeffersonian principle of unreasonable search and seizure, the right to privacy, and the right to be left alone by law enforcement unless there is a “probable cause” that one has committed some infraction. They have destroyed the right of privacy, and the Rights of Man that were so fiercely championed by Jefferson and Madison, the French Revolution, and the British Old Liberals who supported both. 200 years of Civil Rights progress, flushed down the toilet in a few short years by the bipartisans. And their excuse is “Terrorism”.

This is the same excuse that has caused Britain to install thousands of cameras on the streets, watching for “suspicious” behavior. And that in the country that produced Orwell’s “1984”, the writings of Lord Bertrand Russell, and such anti-totalitarians as the novelist and philosopher, Aldous Huxley.

The dilemma is this: on the one side, we have the destruction of human privacy, the dehumanization of the innocent citizen into a puppet whose most intimate regions and most personal business suddenly becomes the business of the government, or any Nosey Parker, or blackmailer, in the government; and also the symbolic castration of the last vestiges of masculinity in a society by ordering a virtual strip search of any citizen. Notice this applies to planes, but does not apply to buses, subways, trains, etc. At least, not yet. Nor does it apply to Congressmen entering the Capitol Dome, although obviously if one of the Congressman became a fanatic and suicide bomber, he could wreck the whole structure of the U.S. Government. If people are going to be strip-searched to get on a plane, then the Congressmen should be strip-searched, or groped, every time they enter the halls of Congress. National Security demands it!

But on the other horn of the dilemma is the problem which both Bertrand Russell and Aldous Huxley pointed out in their writings. This problem, which Russell mentions early on in his writings, probably in the 1920s, is, simply put, that technology will boldly advance while religious and nationalistic fanaticism will remain at its old Dark Ages level, and when those fanatics get their hands on the more modern technology, it will be a wet and windy day for Humanity. Sadly, technology will enable the terrorists, while Aldous Huxley, and to some extent Orwell in “1984”, pointed out that that same technology will also be used by some future Leviathan State to condition and control its citizens.

With the coming of the Obama-Clinton-Napolitano strip searches of the Citizenry, that technological control has been achieved by the Leviathan state. And as we heard early this morning from Iran of yet another suicide bomber (and there were now thought to be two in the crowd), terrorists continue to use the latest in technology to butcher other Human Beings with a pathological callousness that is the product of religious (or nationalistic) fanaticism.

The terrorism will continue, and the restrictions on Jeffersonian Freedoms will continue, unless the public stands up for the Bill of Rights, which it won’t.

Religious and nationalistic fanaticism must be dissolved, and Jeffersonian and Randian Individualism can cure that to a large extent. But the technologies race ahead much faster than any improvement in the Human Psyche, while at the same time, the propagandic forces of corporate advertising, melded with government support for their favorite corporations in America, have so heavily brainwashed and conditioned the individual in Western society, that the only de-conditioning agents most people can find are drugs, which is why the use of self-destroying drugs like alcohol, tobacco, and amphetamine is so widespread throughout America and Europe.

Yet, as technology advances, and government bureaucrats get dumber and more mediocre, there are huge gaps where something like the Wikileaks leaks can break out of the mold, and throw the Leviathan statists on their elbows. They cannot control the technology they create, and creative and nefarious brains can usually think up all sorts of ways in which this technology can be used, to which the creators, and the government bureaucrats, are always late to react, and usually do so by trying to implement “reforms” which only dissipate more human energy in compliance, and which inevitably lead to further loopholes.

Recall that Frederich Hayek pointed out that in government bureaucracies, the mediocre always rise to the top. That is certainly the case in both the American Federal Government, and also the State and local governments. At the lower echelons you may find bright and dedicated people, but the supervisors and administrators… hopeless.

So the world has terrorism, and the world has Leviathan States that more and more control and hem in the Individual. It is the Individual who is perceived as the enemy by both, and whether he can survive the dual assaults of Janet Napolitano on one hand, and the terrorists on the other, is in grave doubt.